This study on Alois Klar (1763-1833) focuses mainly on his achievements as a pedagogue and his work for the visually impaired. Methodologically, it draws on Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Michel Foucault, enabling us to view the evolution of social care as a concomitant of the emerging modern state and integral to its structure. The study presents an analysis of the beginnings of Klar’s Prague institute for the visually impaired against a background of rapid changes in medicine, the scope of the state, and educational thinking. At a time of compulsory school attendance and new approaches to education, when the state demanded the active participation of its subjects/citizens in propagating its aims and the values of society as a whole, the blind and partially sighted were given access to a full and systematic education. We also present data concerning Klar’s educational work and thinking (he taught in Litoměřice and at Prague University), and examine the internal workings of the newly established institute - one of the first of its kind in Europe - and its contacts with the medical discourse of the emerging science of ophthalmology., Marek Fapšo., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy
Wenzel Trnka von Krzowitz was born in 1739 in Tabor. He graduated from the University of Vienna, where after studying philosophy he studied at the Faculty of Medicine. His personality and systematic work attracted the attention of Gerard van Swieten, who in 1769 made a significant contribution to the institutional establishment of the first medical faculty in the Hungarian Lands. Trnka thus became one of the founding members of this faculty, where he was appointed professor of anatomy. The Faculty of Medicine was the last part of the Pázmany University to be established in Trnava, which could not meet the needs of a growing university, especially of the medical faculty itself, and so in 1777 the entire campus was moved to Buda. While still in Trnava, in 1775, Trnka published one of his most important works, Historia febrium intermittentium, in which he discusses intermittent fevers. These fevers were a relatively common and unpleasant phenomenon in Europe, especially in certain regions. They are caused by protozoa of the genus Plasmodium, discovered in the 19th century, which cause several types of malaria, all of them being characterised by periodic bouts of fever. In his work, Trnka discusses in detail both the actual course of the disease and the treatment, emphasizing the use of quinine bark. The work contains several historically valuable chapters. It describes views and treatments of malaria in the 18th century, focusing also on those areas in the Habsburg Monarchy where the disease was widespread. Through Trnka’s work, the article provides an insight into life with this now exotic disease, which is today of little concern in our part of the world.